I’ve got a buddy, Jeremy Tate, trying to displace the ACT and maybe the whole College Board, with the Classical Learning Test. Let’s be blunt: it’s marketed toward college bound classically educated and homeschooled students whose families believe that the public school curriculum is deficient and ideological. Let me say that a perceived ideological bias is one argument, and perceived deficiencies in curriculum are another argument. But in the unfortunate ideological sorting that happens today, that gets conflated by almost everyone.
If I’m honest, some sharp kid could have figured out that I’ve been a partisan, but also all over the place. They might have figured out that I probably would agree more with Zora Neale Hurston than Toni Morrison. Maybe. I never told them what they should think, but I was a really open book, myself. They might have thought it odd that I talked about sacrifice and communal meals as important rituals in world religions, as seen in The Odyssey. I don’t care pedagogically where they worship, or even if they do. But you should know that Dr. King quoted the prophet Isaiah in the “I Have A Dream” speech, and whether Isaiah is in the Jewish or Christian Scriptures (Old or New Testament, we might say, in an earlier time.) Yeah, you have to be careful, and you should. I don’t want clones of myself. Indoctrination is for the military and corporations; not schools.
But I’m not “values-neutral,” I’m conscience neutral. I’m coercion-free, as best as I can be. I have to say, the school and community where I worked was extremely patriotic. And I think we all wanted to partner with happy families and happy, healthy kids. Do I have strong opinions about how we end up there? Yes, man! Will I force anyone to please me with an answer? No. We’re just reading Orwell and Austen, and a little Richard Adams, and a smattering of James Baldwin. Shakespeare, and we watched President Obama speak a little. The arts is part of Language Arts.
The non-public educational choices out there self-select students they want. They don’t educate everyone; the nature of those choices begins with one family and its choices. If you want to homeschool your daughter with severe CP, and she’s bloody brilliant and changes the world, I celebrate. If you need support either financially or whatever else, the public school is there. I’ll stand against anyone who takes actual choices away from families. But too often, conservative “accountability” turns the whole liberal arts into job training. In the Western philosophical tradition, it seeks wisdom and personal virtue. Economic considerations were not unimportant, but they were secondary.
Dare I say, you do not want to bring an unthinking “efficiency” to the task of education. In the end, I may share some concerns with traditional religious believers about bias and manipulation. But public education benefits all of us, even if we make a different choice. And every kid living in America deserves a chance to learn, even if he or she is poor. And perhaps especially so. Or disabled. Or sick. Or something else distinct that has a bearing.
And a system that serves 90 percent of children and young adults isn’t some weird interloper in our civic life; it’s an integral part of it. Why is this not obvious?
Comments